Crash Course: 12 Football Films to Help You Prep for the Super Bowl

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Friday Night Lights (2004)

If you’ve got 50-some hours to kill before kickoff Sunday afternoon, you could spend them binge-watching (or face it, re-watching) the series whose unbeatable story of a West Texas high school football team won over the clear eyes and full hearts of even those most averse to the sport. Can’t call in sick for the rest of the week? Watch the film that launched the show, starring Billy Bob Thornton in the role of the coach whose rocky highs and lows are in league with his players.

Tom Cruise in his most convincing on-screen flip-out before he ever leapt up on Oprah’s sofa. Cuba Gooding “Show me the money!” Jr.Renée Zellweger.Cameron Crowe’s saga of a troubled sports agent. Two one-liners that are still in circulation nearly two decades after they were first uttered in the theater. You had us at hello.

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The Blind Side (2009)

Based on the book by Moneyball author Michael Lewis,The Blind Side earned Sandra Bullock an Oscar for her portrayal of a wealthy woman whose motives for taking in a down-on-his-luck teenage athlete (Quinton Aaron) are later called into question when he becomes a sought-after top pick among NCAA recruiters.

Herman Boone, Denzel Washington’s character, has just been tapped to coach the team of a newly desegregated school in 1971 Virginia, replacing the former head coach (Will Patton) who happens to be white. While neither of them is exactly thrilled with the arrangement, Boone remains determined not to lose and to teach his players as much about respect as about winning.

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Wildcats (1986)

Okay, it may not be Overboard, but it’s just as repeat-watchable. Clearly channeling her Private Benjamin years, it isGoldie Hawn, here as blonde turned football coach, leading a team (including a Cheers-era Woody Harrelson) from a high school so tough her players stub out their smokes in the palms of their hands. Before everybody’s favorite shade-throwing cheer, “U.G.L.Y., You ain’t got no alibi,” got a danced-up cameo in Bring It On, it earned an awesomely scrappy, utterly memorable rendition in this movie.

Panned by one critic as the “Flashdance of football” (that’s a bad thing?), All the Right Moves has a plot that reads like a Bruce Springsteen song: a budding football star (here in the form of a letter-jacked Tom Cruise) trapped in a steel town. To prepare for their roles, costar Lea Thompson and Cruise were enrolled as students—and Cruise, whose poster was no doubt already taped up in plenty of lockers, was recognized immediately.

Costarring Burt Reynolds’s mustache and Kris Kristofferson’s haircut, Semi-Tough is less concerned with winning or losing than it is with its own totally campy, bizarrely funny brand of sketch-comedy-style satire, taking plenty digs at New Age trends of the seventies. Both men are football semipros, though the real playing field of this movie is the completely over-the-top Miami penthouse of the daughter of their team’s owner (Jill Clayburgh), and the real contest, has very, very little to do with the actual sport.

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Undefeated (2011)

Too true to be this good: Undefeated is the Oscar-winning documentary chronicling a season in the life of an underdog inner-city team in Memphis, Tennessee, led by a white coach known as Big Daddy Snowflake. His challenge is not simply reversing the direction of the scoreboard, but also making sure his players actually show up to school; your challenge is to make it through this heartbreaker without shedding a tear.

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Paper Lion (1968)

If Walter Mitty dared to live out and not simply dream his secret lives, he might have been more like George Plimpton, the inimitable longtime Paris Review editor and erstwhile sportswriter who made a sideline career out of posing himself in various Mittyesque, Method actor–like stunts, and then publishing his experiences in Sports Illustrated. Despite his sheer lack of quarterback skills, the Detroit Lions agreed to let him train with the team, and it’s that story of that time, of course, that scores, with Alan Alda as Plimpton, and Lauren Hutton cheering on.

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The Replacements (2000)

Here is Keanu Reeves, fresh out of the Matrix, as the “scab,” “not a has-been . . . a never-was,” who subs for the star quarterback when the pros go on strike; here is Gene Hackman, a year before he became head of the Tenenbaum clan, as coach; here is Orlando Jones, choreographing a prison dance to “I Will Survive.” As Keanu says in that sage surfer voice only Keanu possesses: “Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory lasts forever.” Yeah.

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Football films: At their best, they convey all the drama, suspense, and off-the-field stories of any game worth its hype. For those who are already counting down the minutes till the end of the fourth quarter is said and done, we’ve rounded up a dozen movies—in no particular order—that even the most rabid non sports fan can root for. Some of these were made on a budget little more than the price of a 30-second Super Bowl commercial. Some of them are legitimately serious, some seriously laughable, but isn’t that, after all, the nature of the game?

See the slideshow of twelve football movies to watch before Sunday’s Super Bowl showdown.